Blurring boundaries, claiming space: A social history of Indians in South Africa, 1860-1915 (original) (raw)

This dissertation scrutinizes the history of Indian colonial migrants in South Africa between 1860 and 1915 to analyze the politics of belonging, social exclusion, and diasporic consciousness through a detailed analysis of archival sources and secondary material. As Indians moved from one part of the British Empire to another as labor migrants and for the purposes of trade, they experienced conditions of racial discrimination which were similar to those in British India, yet differently structured on account of a distinctive set of colonial laws, modalities of rule and socioeconomic circumstances. This led to the development of a set of survival strategies, on the part of Indians both indentured and middle class, that incorporated the combined approach of accommodation and resistance while interacting with the colonial state and its machinery of control. I argue that in their struggle for legitimacy, Indians claimed the status of imperial citizens, thus drawing on their standing as British subjects in India to claim political and social entitlements in South Africa. This blurs the boundary between the citizen and the subject and I contend that it is through their claim to rights as imperial citizens that Indians trouble the ideology and discourse of citizenship and provide empirical evidence of the transactional and mobile nature of this category. This dissertation is also an analysis of a new form of resistance politics-Gandhian satyagraha that was non-violent in nature, based on the belief in the right to iii acts of civil disobedience as imperial citizen/subjects, and involved the mass participation of Indian migrants who were divided by class, gender and religion. This history allows me to argue that 'the Indian community' did not exist a priori and had to be produced in order to be effective in resistance. I highlight the contingent, fluid nature of the category of community and argue that for colonial Indian migrants, community only existed in heightened moments of communal anxiety, which culminated in mass action, and dissipated with the end of the crisis. At a macro level, this dissertation is an exploration of the geopolitical relationship between the metropole and the colonies and as such, contributes to the sociology of empire, labor migration, diasporic studies and the sociology of citizenship.